temporary oblivion of his distress is an interval to recount his former magnanimous achievements. Again he returns to his departed Cordelia, and bewails her loss with wild lamentations and distracted sorrow. These pangs are too violent for continuance. Suddenly he feels the sense of suffocation from a rush of blood to the brain, a fatal return of the " climbing sorrow" he had felt before. The immediate feeling of self-preservation again interrupts his ecstacy of grief-he solicits assistance:

Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, Sir.

His paroxysm again returns, an apoplectic seizure cuts short the accents of his despair and he dies on the body of his murdered daughter.

Throughout this exquisite character the author has displayed such intimate knowledge of the human intellect, and so correctly painted the succession of mental operations, that the picture can only be viewed as the great masterpiece of phsychological delineation.

Cordelia describes her father as wandering about, mad as the vexed sea,

Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn.

It would be unjust not to notice that these "simples operative 'whose power will close the eye

of anguish," are all strongly indicative of the state of Lear's mind.

FUMITER (Fumeterre, French). Fumitory, Fumaria officinalis, Linn. It is common to our corn-fields and ditch banks. The leaves are of bitter taste, and the juice was formerly employed for its bitterness, in hypochondrism and black jaundice by Hoffman and others; and more lately by Cullen in leprosy.

FURROW-WEEDS. Rank, as they are here expressly called, or strong scented, growing wild in the furrow, and disgusting to the taste and other senses.

HARLOCKS. Sinapis arvensis, Linn. The wild mustard of our corn-fields, called indifferently charlock, garlock, harlock, warlock, and, by Fitzherbert and other old English writers, hedlock. The seeds of this plant form the pungent Durham mustard, as those of Sinapis alba form the white mustard, and those of Sinapis nigra the common mustard. The plant rises with a stem of about nine inches, thickly set with hairs or bristles. Hence the proper name should probably be hair-lock, as in Danish they call the DARNEL heyre and hey re-grass. As the bitter pungency is referred to in the former case, the biting pungency is referred to, here.

HEMLOCK. This plant requires no explanation; it is generally known to be poisonous.

NETTLES. Urtica urens, Linn. Called urens

from its well-known irritating power of stinging and burning.

CUCKOO-FLOWERS.

Cardamine pratensis,

Linn. These flowers, the sysymbrium of Dioscorides, were employed among the Greeks and Romans for almost all affections of the head. They at present hold a place in the Pharmacopoeia, as a remedy for convulsions, epilepsy, and other diseases of the brain or intellect.

DARNEL. Lolium temulentum, Linn. Called temulentum from its intoxicating or narcotic powers, when taken alone, or intermixed with malt. From this deleterious property it is termed by Virgil infelix lolium. lurid lolium, and by the French ivraie, whence our own vulgar name for it of wray-grass or drunkard-grass.

These plants are all wild and uncultivated; of bitter, biting, poisonous, pungent, lurid, and distracting properties. Thus Lear's crown is admirably descriptive or emblematic of the sources and variety of the disease under which he labours. The mixture of such flowers and plants could not be the effect of chance. Yet none of the Commentators have given Shakespeare credit for the arrangement.

MELANCHOLIA, OR MELANCHOLY MADNESS.

HAMLET.

Melancholy.-Melancholie, French: from péλavos and xoλñ, a kind of madness in which the mind is always fixed on one object:-Johnson.

MELANCHOLY denotes a morbid affection of mind, an extreme depression of spirits, and a disrelish of those enjoyments that constitute, to a certain degree, the happiness of others. As the symptoms advance, and the disorder becomes exasperated, there is generally some existing delusion. The wealthy often insist that their property is annihilated, and expect to be a burden on the parish. Those of exemplary morals conceive them. selves the perpetrators of the blackest crimes; and this persuasion is usually accompanied by an intolerance of life, and a crafty contrivance of means for its destruction.-Such a case is Hamlet's.

Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to have been by nature a volatile and ardent Prince, whose temper and dispositions had suffered deep impression by the death of his father, the speedy marriage of his mother, and the suspension of his own right con

sequent on that marriage. These circumstances, operating suddenly on a mind predisposed to gaiety and to the follies which spring from youthful effervescence, give a tinge of melancholy to his train of thought which speedily but imperceptibly produces an instability of intellect. Whilst thus suffering from mental depression the suspicion of his father's murder induces him to put on an antic disposition, that, under colour of madness, he may be less liable to scrutiny and more free scope be thereby afforded for the measures he shall take to arrive at full conviction. From this period he strives to "wipe from the table of his memory all trivial fond records that youth and observation copied there," except as those pressures may tend to the accomplishment of his object; and thus, in cherishing a favourite design, and permitting the ghost's

Commandment all alone to live,

Within the book and volume of his brain,
Unmixed with baser matter,

he gives growth and maturity to a malady, the -seeds of which had germinated in his mind,

until in the end he actually labours under the infirmity which his previous declaration shows he but intended to feign.

Here it may be proper to observe, that feigning madness is frequently a favourite theory with insane persons.